Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

What the Rise of Technology Has to Do With the Decline of Driving

In dozens of small ways, emerging technology has been subtly nudging
our behavior – at work, at home, while socializing or traveling – in
ways that directly impact how people use transportation.
Teleconferencing has made telework more common. E-commerce has reduced
the need to drive to the mall. Real-time arrival apps have made public
transit more predictable. Solar-powered stations have helped bike-share
expand. WiFi and smart phones have made it possible to get work done on a
moving bus, raising the mental cost of driving alone. And social media,
for some people, has reduced the need to travel across town to see a
friend you might more easily connect with on Facebook.

None of these personal technology trends has really revolutionized
American mobility patterns, and for that reason it's easy to overlook
their importance in influencing how people get around (people are
driving less because of... apps?). But taken together? "They really seem
to be more than the sum of their parts," says Phineas Baxandall with
the U.S. PIRG Education Fund.

He helped prepare a new report
out today on the role of transportation apps and vehicle-sharing tools
in giving more Americans "the freedom to drive less." The paper neatly
dovetails with a broad survey of Millennial transportation habits also
published today by the American Public Transportation Association.
Millennials, after all, are frequently early adopters of new
technology, whether in the form of route-planning applications or
bike-share services. And as we've previously written, they've been squarely behind the trend toward less driving in America. It stands, then, to reason that the two trends are related.

As the APTA report frames this:

History shows that the combination of technological change, such as
the advent of smartphone technology, television, or radio; combined with
macro forces that shape behaviors, such as the Great Recession, the
Great Depression, or World War II can lead to societal change that can
last generations.

It's virtually impossible to quantify the cumulative impact of all this
technological change on the decline in driver's licenses or car
registrations or miles traveled (is "new technology" responsible for 15
percent of the drop? 30 percent?). Baxandall reasons, though, that "it’s
definitely a significant piece of what’s behind the driving trends. But
if you look to the future, it seems even more significant. All of these
things are really just in their infancy."

Five years ago, you may not have had a smart phone. Your city
definitely did not release real-time bus arrival information.
Bike-sharing systems, at least in the U.S., were but a dream. Carry this
story another five years into the future, and WiFi will be even more
ubiquitous. Smart phone fare payment systems will make it even easier to
use public transit and to transfer between modes. These kinds of
technologies, APTA figures, will allow transit users to be more
spontaneous, further eroding one of the main competitive advantages of
the private car.

In APTA's survey of 1,000 Millennials in Boston, Chicago, San
Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, 40 percent said they work
while they travel (you can't – or shouldn't – do that in a car). Forty
percent of the survey group also did not own a car at all. And another
69 percent said they use multiple modes of transportation to reach a
single destination at least a few times a week.

That survey suggests that Millennials have not entirely fallen out of
love with the car. Asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 5, their preferred
mode of transit, respondents said this on average (1 being most
preferred):APTA "Millennials and Mobility" report

But even as many Millennials will continue to drive, all of this technology means both that they'll be able to drive less
and that the alternatives to driving will become more attractive. What
we have yet to learn is what this picture will look like as Millennials
age into parenthood. Some of the results from this same survey on that
front were particularly interesting.

Here is the percentage of respondents who strongly agreed with the following statements:

APTA "Millennials and Mobility" report

Notably, only 27 percent of child-less Millennials said they picture
themselves residing long-term in an urban setting, a decision that
dictates many of the transportation modes available to them (there's no
point in using a transit app if you live nowhere near transit). And so
this is reason for caution in tracing these trends out into the future.

There's also one other big piece to this story of technology: Are
cities doing their best it leverage it? Are they releasing transit data
and pushing public WiFi and supporting the expansion of car- or
bike-sharing networks?

"In thinking about technology as a cause for anything, I’m always a
little wary," Baxandall says. "Once [tools] are created, they can make
possible great changes. But they themselves don’t make the change
happen. So far as technology is a tool, it depends on what people do
with it and what kinds of systems are set up for it.